Rebecca Greenfield

The Israeli mobile GPS startup Waze has another mega-suitor in Silicon Valley, with Google reportedly joining the bidding war and topping the $1 billion offer rumored to be coming from Facebook. What is it, really, about this mapping app that's drawing acquisition prices as high as — if not higher than — Instagram and Tumblr?

Doesn't Ashton Kutcher know what happens to people who complain about how terrible Twitter has gotten since the good old days? They get shamed with the following adage: Twitter is what you make it, bro.

In an attempt to move beyond standard promoted tweets, Twitter is trying so hard to legitimize its business model that, well, you're about to find out just how much Twitter really knows about where you shop. And the main privacy model "doesn't actually provide protection," a leading online privacy firm tells The Atlantic Wire.

Shazam, the song-identifying app whose logo keeps making its way onto TVs for second-screen expansion, has expanded its smart-listening deeper into your life with a new automatic tagging feature that basically turns your iPhone or iPad into a personal little wiretap.

After taking a little break from the classic Mac-vs- PC wars to punch a little lower (at Samsung), Microsoft has decided to return to its old rivalry, hoping to revive slow Surface tablet sales with a little anti-Apple advertising.

Twitter has added two-step verification to increase its security after all the recent hacks into high profile media accounts, but you should go sign up for it right this minute — because everyone's vulnerable to password attacks these days, even if the new cellphone hiccup seems cumbersome.

While it houses a lot of cooky ideas that never see the light of day, the "top-secret" innovation hub birthed Google Glass and Google's driverless cars. So as outlandish as some of the following ideas may sound, they're all in the works or they suddenly aren't, per Businessweek's new cover story — yes, even the balloons — and, hey, maybe they'll come true, too.

As much masochistic fun as it may be to follow the cicada sex invasion via Twitter's ever popular Vine app, the brave backyard directors chronicling the East Coast's ongoing insect phenomenon don't seem to be enjoying the process too much — many of them are just resorting to violence against the little guys, who die almost instantly upon their return to earth anyway.

Despite all the glowing reviews of the HTC One, it's still not beating Samsung's Galaxy S IV in the high-end, non-iPhone smartphone market, and HTC is currently falling apart — at least in part because of "disastrous" sales that wiped the HTC First (aka the Facebook phone) on its way out of the market.

Every single one of Tumblr's 178 employees will get money from the $1.1 billion Yahoo deal, which means that if the site hadn't let go of its three editorial team members last month, they too would have received $371,000 — each.

The U.S. Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations had some tough questions for Tim Cook, CEO of computer giant Apple which stands accused of tax avoidance to the tune of billions of dollars. Questions like: "Why the hell do I have to keep updating my apps on my iPhone all the time and why you don't fix that?"

Kids, listen up: don't start dropping out of high school just because the Tumblr CEO David Karp, who just sold his Internet company to Yahoo for $1.1 billion, had neither a high school nor a college degree.

The typical gadget review these days can run thousands of words and cover hundreds of features before telling you what you really want to know: is this thing any good? The Atlantic Wire will cut to the chase after spending a week with a device and give you just the bottom line.

All this crying over how much this Yahoo acquisition will ruin Tumblr is a predictable part of the cycle of tech company acquisitions these days — no matter how smart or dumb the buy — and says nothing about how the impending marriage will do.

Harmless scientific marvel though it may be, the summer of bug love has arrived — perhaps entering your backyard or urban escape as soon as this weekend — and it's pretty gross. For those of you with a fear of flying insects, it's downright terrifying. Here's a handy guide for East Coast entomophobes, with the help of the Internet's ultimate cicada expert.

Ahead of a public hearing Friday pitting upstart mobile food vendors against sedentary street vendors and old-school sidewalk restaurants, George Farrell — a Washington Times "community" member — settled on a reason to take sides: "propane tanks inside food trucks could easily become explosive devices" and "may pose a terrorism threat."

Three and a half months after Twitter's stop-motion inauspicious foray into pseudo-video began, Vine has officially made it in the Internet world, thanks to a pitch-perfect (if kinda creepy) meme built on a meme god of Internet yore (as in, like, last year).

For the cord-cutters and cable-company haters out there eagerly awaiting the next era of television, in which you no longer have to pay your provider for a bundled package of junk you never watch, YouTube officially launched 14 of its rumored pay-to-subscribe channels on Friday. It's not top-shelf, but it's a start. Just ask Washington.

The first two months of Google Glass testimonials resulted in lame sports videos and bad photos taken with the wearable machine, but a new first-person video that surfaced last night finally gives the face computer-less masses a look at what you actually see from behind the glass.

Facebook's in "advanced talks" to buy Waze, an Israeli mapping start-up, for somewhere between $800 million and $1 billion, according to multiple sources at Calcalist and TechCrunch, making it the social media company's biggest acquisition to date.

Google Glass has itself a marketing problem: the glasses might be as cool as some Glassheads say, but the rest of us non-early adopters are stuck with boring first-person videos and banal pictures of the world's foremost face computer, without any of the cool face-computer functionality.

The Onion has released a detailed account of how it believes the Syrian Electronic Army hacked into its extremely popular Twitter account the other day, providing a rare glimpse at the simple yet devious spear-phishing emails that can crack major media outlets — and probably you.

It's never a good sign when a cellphone company lowers the price of a cellphone so soon after its release, which makes the new, very low $0.99 price of HTC's so-called Facebook phone so very foreboding.

It's still relatively unclear whether the Assad regime broke the Syrian Internet — even if nobody else, even "terrorists," really could — but after a 19-and-a-half-hour near complete shutdown across Syria, service started coming back today, according to multiple analytics firms.

Google may or may not introduce a new design for Google Maps at a conference next week, when the company will publicly discuss about "the future of Google Maps." But people are definitely complaining about the rumored design getting passed around the web today. Here's how.